in Projects, Programming, Technology

Aligning Community Features to Customer Motivations

At last week’s Social Media Club Seattle Meeting, Sean Moffitt presented on “Wiki-brands.” He coined this term to describe companies with successful (active) customer communities after interviewing a slew of very large companies.

One slide that particularly interested me from Sean’s presentation was one on “Matching Community Incentives to Motivation”. He indicated that there were patterns of human behavior (motivations) that you should aim to please with community features.

I have stolen a slide out of Sean’s presentation, and re-worded things very slightly to match my own experiences with HelpShare, Lookmarks, and most recently Twibes Twitter Groups. This chart indicates the type of motivation, and the type of community feature that can facilitate that motivation. I color-coded the features applicable to Twibes where we’re doing a good (green), average (yellow), or bad (red) job.

Community Motives

Hopefully this will help you prioritize features for your own online community. Are there other motivations we are missing?

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  1. You’ve given me some great ideas for my brand. Hmmm…now, how to implement them? 🙂

    FYI – You list as “Dofollow” but are appending “nofollow” tags to your links. 😉

  2. Great post. Although I do not fully agree with your chart I will agree with the some of it. I need to create a chart like this for my company to see where I need to put more focus in. Thanks for the idea.

  3. As a new blogger, it’s interesting to hear your take on this – especially “Twibes.” It seems like a bit of an advanced concept though to be sure. As an aside, I also use the Thesis theme, and I really like it.

  4. As a new blogger, it’s interesting to hear your take on this – especially “Twibes.” It seems like a bit of an advanced concept though to be sure. As an aside, I also use the Thesis theme, and I really like it.

  5. Great post. Although I do not fully agree with your chart I will agree with the some of it. I need to create a chart like this for my company to see where I need to put more focus in. Thanks for the idea.